Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[r3bol]

I am very interested in one of the fan-less VIA EPIA Series http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/ (or similar brand) mini-motherboards. I aim for it to be used for internet activities and as a DVD player.
I was wondering if puppy runs on these types of MMB and whether Puppy or other live distros made use of some of the MPEG acceleration features some of them come with?
Other distro considerations would be GeeBox and KnoppMyth (any other recommendations?).
The one thing that worried me was DVD playback. I noticed my encrypted DVD movies played a bit choppy in puppy, but non-encrypted played ok. I havent messed with any settings yet though so maybe I can sort that out.

Any advice for a noob is much appreciated.
Thanks.

[Flash]

I think the VIA Epia has a hardware DVD decoder onboard, but I don't know if Linux uses it. It might be worth asking VIA. As popular as their Epia is with people who run Linux on it, they should be eager to make sure it works with Linux.

[pakt]

r3bol, you might try Minipup2.02R from this site: http://bexa.org/

It uses MPlayer instead of Gxine and works quite well with multimedia.

Paul

[r3bol]

Thanks, just asked VIA about linux support. I'll try that other puppy version too.
I have been googling and found that checking DMA is 'on' could help with DVD playback. How do I check this in puppy? A forum search came back zero.

I thought this was interesting: GNU/Linux DVD Player Review

[tempestuous]

Most EPIA's are equipped with the VIA Unichrome graphics chip, which features hardware-assisted MPEG2 decoding ... with the right drivers.
First you need the 3D Unichrome graphics driver installed and working - use MU's 3D Control Centre to install -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=14463

Then you need a video playback application which supports the "XvMC" hardware-assisted feature -
MPlayer 1.0rc1 + XvMC http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=13216

Several forum members have Puppy installed on their Epia's with XvMC working.

[pakt]

Type 'dmesg | grep -i dma' in a terminal. You should see something like this:

ide0: BM-DMA at 0xbfa0-0xbfa7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio

Paul

[tempestuous]

dvw86 wrote a nice wiki page about Puppy + Epia ML8000 - http://puppylinux.org/wikka/MiniITX

And Minipup, which Paul mentioned, is currently being upgraded. It will include the latest MPlayer version with Openchrome-XvMC support.

[r3bol]

sh-3.00# dmesg | grep -i dma
VP_IDE: VIA vt8235 (rev 00) IDE UDMA133 controller on pci0000:00:11.1
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfc00-0xfc07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xfc08-0xfc0f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hda: 78242976 sectors (40060 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
hdc: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

Is everything I get back.

[pakt]

[r3bol]

If anyone else is interested, here is my reply from VIA...

[lvds]

[tempestuous]

Minipup will have ALMOST the same version of MPlayer that is already available as a dotpup here -
http://puppyfiles.org/dotpupsde/dotpups/Multimedia/Mplayer-1.0rc1/
The only difference is GTK2 compatibility, because Puppy's version of GTK2 changed from Puppy-2.10 onwards.
What does this mean ... don't install this dotpup on versions of Puppy earlier than 2.10. Or the gui will fail to launch.

[DavidBell]

I have two, an EPIA-V & an EPIA-ML.

Both work with Puppy except the EPIA-V has only one IDE slot and you have to have the the HDD & CD/DVD on the same cable. I find that you can only read one CD with this arrangement, to read another you have to reboot At least that's the case with Puppy 2.12

On the plus side for the EPIA-V it has S-Video out which would be nice for a DVD player. There are a lot of models and you need to check which ones have the features/plugs that you want.

One other thing, again with Puppy 2.12, I find when you use Xorg any scrolling or screen updates makes the sound jump. It doesn't happen with Xvesa.

DB

[tempestuous]

It's true that Xorg consumes more system resources than Xvesa, but when it comes to media applications this overhead is worthwhile.
For media playback Xorg is vastly superior to Xvesa, especially when the correct "xv" video output option is selected in MPlayer.

[lvds]